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It’s dreadful – kids ask and ask for them, can we get one, mum and dad, can we, can we? I’ll look after him! Then a few days later, bored, they discard the poor thing and it ends up abandoned on the cold, winter streets. A Minion is for life, people, not just for Christmas, stop the dumping of poor, unloved Minions on our streets!

This short film by Rino Stefano Tagliafierro is stunning – working through centuries of art in a few moments and using some subtle animation to bring it to life it raises questions about how humans perceive beauty; as it progresses it becomes darker, even the lusciously painted nudes start to become a little disturbing as they hint at more than beauty but a darker sensuality, and as it moves into scenes not only examining external beauty but within the body it also becomes a little horrific. But it’s all fascinating…

Vie d’Enfer is a terrific short animated film, where a portly wee demon who clearly loves his work of tormenting the damned gets a bit carried away, overloads the torture machine and blows himself all the way to the opposing realm, where the soon runs amuck. The animation style is great, with a genuine sense of fun and dark humour that will appeal to folk like me who enjoy Edward Gorey and Tim Burton:

Wolfsong is a very sad and yet beautiful and moving short animated film by Toniko Pantoja: a wolf mother tries to regain her lost cub, now dead and stuffed as the trophy of an uncaring hunter, so she can sing the cub to sleep, but alas the hunter follows her determined not to lose his prize…

I found this achingly beautiful pice of short, award-winning animation, Caldera, on Vimeo. A film from Evan Viera and friends, it is largely a homage to his father, who had to deal with images and delusions due to a mental disorder. It follows a young woman who experiences some quite remarkable visual worlds due to her own mental health issues, worlds that society decides she must control and curb with medication, bringing her back to the drab constrictions of what people rather foolishly call reality (as if they had any real idea what that actually was), but the realms in her imagination are too vibrant to be contained. The film reminds me very much of one of my favourite literary works of all time, Don Quixote, and how sometimes we are happier with our delusions; perhaps if more questioned the nature of imagination and reality and our individual natures rather than the bland demand for all to conform we’d have a happier society. There is some gloriously beautiful visual imagery in this animation, especially a scene where she leaps into a nocturnal, glowing sea, like falling into stars, or swimming with a great sea turtle. Beautiful work.

During the epic Voyager missions, after one of those innovative little mechanical explorers had finished with its primary mission to give us our most astonishing close up encounters with the most distant worlds in our solar system in a detail that Galileo and Copernicus could never have dreamed possible, it was re-tasked and reprogrammed to turn around to look back into our solar system from the cold, dark edge of our own little stellar neighbourhood. The late, great Carl Sagan was one of those who campaigned for this to happen – no small feat given the codes to reprogramme the distant probe would take hours to reach it even travelling at the light speed of radio waves, so far was it from home now, and there was no true scientific knowledge to be gained from this move.

Sagan, however, always understood that science has to appeal to both the heart as well as the head, emotion and intellect, and be able to make everyone grasp why it was important to us. The spacecraft was turned and took what is now known as the family portrait, a view of most of the planets in our solar system, a perspective no-one in the entire history of humanity had ever beheld before, a real “going where no-one had gone before” moment. In that family portrait is a pale, blue dot, not even an entire pixel in size – our world, the Earth. As Sagan put it, everything any of us has ever known, every person we have read of, every person who built a monument we’ve gazed at, everyone we have ever loved and all those who came before them, right back to the emergence of our ancestors out of ancient Africa’s cradle to start out human journey, every one of them, peasant and king alike, lived on that tiny dot. Joel Somerfield’s animation is very short but celebrates that moment, using the words of Sagan, a moment when emotion and science, heart and intellect, gave our species a new perspective on the majesty of creation and our own place in it, just a tiny mote floating in the glow of the sun, miniscule in astronomical terms, fragile, but never, ever unimportant, but a wonder in a sea of wonders, a haven of spectacularly diverse life. Our home.

TiM is a wonderful short animated film from Ken Turner, about a little boy who is different and relies on his own imagination to get him through, losing himself in drawing, making his own films and watching movies. But most of all he wants, when he grows up, to be Tim Burton. A lovely little homage to being different and how we all find little pieces of wonder that, even if most others don’t understand, mean the world to us and make life more magical.

Kevin Margo‘s short science fiction film Grounded is a fascinating piece – a spaceship breaks up entering an alien world’s atmosphere, spreading wreckage across an alien landscape. As one of the surviving astronauts comes to we move through a sequence of almost dream like, overlapping scenes (with little hints of that final segment of 2001: a Space Odyssey), which are deliberately open to interpretation, fascinating visuals working with the viewer’s own mind to suggest ideas and narratives:

In-Between is a wonderfully charming short animation, in French (with English subtitles, although there isn’t too much dialogue), about a young woman whose fears and timidness manifests itself in the form of a crocodile only she can see, who playfully stops her trying new things or meeting new people. It’s a lovely wee piece and, rather pleasingly, it doesn’t play out in the most predictable manner but takes a slightly different (and smile inducing) route: